Thread icons: Why?

[SuicidalMedia]

Why do we have them on our forums? For example, vBulletin has two handy features: "New Posts" and "Today's Posts" - Both show the latest threads from all forums. You can also show the latest threads/posts to registered users on the forum index as well, so the lazy users don't have to click anything other than the thread link.

So, I'm thinking of removing them on my forum as they just impact the load time, and I'm pretty sure that "New Posts" and "Today's Posts" are a better alternative than checking every forum manually.

Before I do that, I'd like to hear opinions of other Webmasters...

P.S. Don't say they make the forum look fancy, lol.

 

[Daniel]

I never thought about it. I have never used them much either. They've only been there as part of the whole.

 

[SuicidalMedia]

I'm talking about thread icons (they indicate if the forum has new posts), not the post icons. Even though I find both pretty useless.

 

[bxflow]

Sometimes I click the "mark all forums as read" because they are annoying since I dont read every forum section on this site so they "NEW POST" icon is always on

 

[SuicidalMedia]

Exactly. Anyway, I removed them - index loads faster and it looks pretty good without them as well.